


worth fighting for

by icoulddothisallday, TetrodotoxinB



Series: MCU Kink Bingo 2017 [24]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abduction, Blood, Bondage, Clint feels too, Cutting, D/s AU, Deaf Character, F/M, Forced Nudity, Fucked Up Relationships, Gun play, Heavy BDSM, Invasion of Privacy, Knife Play, Mindfuck, Non-Consensual Alcohol Use, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Phil Coulson Has the Patience of a Saint, References to Child Abuse, References to rape (non-graphic), Sensory Deprivation, Simulated blinding, Tawse, Undernegotiated Kink, Whipping, bingo square: fear kink, bingo square: negotiation, but they're working on it, dom!Natasha, ftm character, nat has lots of feels, non-consensual removal of hearing aids, relationship and kink negotiation, simulated bone breaking, sub!clint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 19:48:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13508547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icoulddothisallday/pseuds/icoulddothisallday, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TetrodotoxinB/pseuds/TetrodotoxinB
Summary: Clint and Nat decide to take their relationship to the next level. It doesn't go like either of them had hoped.Part of a greater D/s AU.PLEASE MIND THE TAGS.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Please read the tags. They are there for a reason.  
> Courageous beta by [notlucy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notlucy/pseuds/notlucy) and [farkenshnoffingottom](http://archiveofourown.org/users/farkenshnoffingottom/pseuds/farkenshnoffingottom).
> 
> Chapter 1: Fear kink

Clint thumbs through the pages that Nat’s given him. He’s seen these before, but never much understood the point of them. If you negotiated everything, it took the fun out of it. “You really wanna do all this touchy-feely negotiation shit, Nat?”

Nat looks at him quizzically. Her eyes are dark, something unreadable in them. Clint likes that about her, likes that he doesn’t know what to expect. It makes life unpredictable, thrilling, distracting. “What’s your alternative?”

Clint shrugs, tossing the papers on the coffee table. “I dunno. I mean, we’re both adults, and we’ve pretty much seen everything there is to see. Surprise me. I trust you not to maim me or anything.”

“Okay, then. So fear and edge play? Knives, guns, rape, breathplay, drugs, waterboarding, electricity — there a hard limit in there anywhere?” There’s a sharp quality to her voice that Clint’s heard before — during interrogations, at the other end of his coms during a particularly violent mission. Just like on those occasions, a flare of heat shoots through him. Fuck, the ways this woman could hurt him.

Clint shakes his head. “Not really. Been there, done all that. Put me through the wringer, if you want. I trust you.” And he does, he really does. More than that, he wants to hurt for her. If he bleeds long enough and screams loud enough, maybe she’ll understand all the things Clint doesn’t know how to say. 

Nat stares at Clint for a few seconds, and he thinks for a moment that she’s going to insist on the worksheets. But she just nods. 

“Okay,” she agrees. He breathes a sigh of relief and lets himself start to wonder what she might do to him.

*

For all Nat’s questions about guns and shit, the scenes they’d done since had been relatively tame. It was good, the way everything with Nat was, but not what he dreamed about doing with her.

Clint’s daydreaming, wandering aimlessly, when a windowless van pulls up at the end of the alley. The window rolls down, and a thug in a tracksuit and ski mask levels a gun at him.

A sharp pain in his right thigh tells him that he’s been hit, and he looks down to see a dart sticking out of his leg. He rips it out and tosses it on the ground. 

“Aw, leg, no.”

Knowing he has to get the fuck out of there as fast as possible, he turns and runs for the other end of the alley. He fumbles his phone out of his pocket and hits Natasha’s speed dial. It rings through to voicemail.

Shit.

“Nat, it’s me. I’m in an alley off Herkimer. Someone just tranq’ed me. It’s hittin’ hard, I’m not gonna last.”

He makes it almost to the end of the alley before he trips and falls. He staggers to his feet and stumbles forward again. The world is spinning now, and he knows he needs to get out into the open where someone can see him. 

He’s almost there. It’s so close, and he puts on speed even though his vision is going dark at the edges. 

Fuck.

A van rolls up in front of him, blocking the exit to the alley. The door swings open and tracksuit bro hops out. _God, did they already make the block?_ Clint swings wild and misses. Tracksuit bro lands a solid hit in his gut and tosses him in the back of the van. 

He’s out before the door closes.

*

Ow. Fucking _ow_.

Coming to, Clint keeps his breath even — as long as the shitheads who grabbed him don’t know he’s alert he’s got the advantage. He listens, but there’s nothing. His aids must be out. Shit.

Giving up on keeping whoever’s nabbed him in the dark, Clint blinks and goddamn it’s all he can do to bite back a scream. It feels like ground glass under his eyelids. The room is dark, and he can’t see anything. Fucking hell, this is just going from bad to worse. 

He resolutely shelves the fear that the pain in his eyes and the darkness mean something more: it’s _temporary_. It has to be fucking temporary.

Slowly, he starts to move, trying to use his remaining senses to figure out where the fuck he is. His body is tied to a hard chair, hands bound behind his back, ankles tied to the legs. He rolls his neck and feels it crack. He must have been strapped into this chair for quite a while to develop a crick this bad. The way his shoulders pulse and his ankles complain confirms it.

 

There’s nothing but darkness and silence for what feels like hours and hours, but Clint knows it can’t be nearly that long. He’s not dehydrated yet, and he doesn’t yet have to piss. It’s the sensory deprivation, he knows. No light, no sound, you lose all sense of time. It’s a familiar tactic, especially if the bad guys know he’s deaf. Never gets any fucking easier, though, and Clint can’t help the way he narrows his eyes, hoping to be able to see something — even if it’s just some goddamn light. 

Pain shoots through him, radiating through his eyes, digging into his brain. With a muted scream, he shuts his eyes and focuses on the feel of the chair, trying to put the pain out of mind. The chair’s bolted to the floor. It’s metal and strong enough to resist any pulling that he does. He can feel the ropes begin to wear away his skin as he struggles, but he’s not strong enough to break them. Whoever tied them fucking knows what they’re doing. 

Since the chair turns out to be a wash, Clint turns his attention to the floor. Whoever nabbed him left his shoes on. Normally, that wouldn’t be smart. It’s an advantage if it should come to a fight. But in this case, it adds to the sensory deprivation. He can’t feel vibrations through the floor, can’t tell where he is, can’t feel for anything that might be going on around him. 

Whoever’s got him knows a thing or two about deaf people, and that scares Clint more than anything else. This is meticulously planned, not the work of a bunch of bros in tracksuits. He breathes through his nose and tries to stay calm, but shit shit shit. There’s no way he can escape like this — stupid boots or no.

Before he can work himself up any further, someone slaps him hard across his face. He thinks they might be speaking, but he can’t be sure. After a few moments, they do it again. 

“I can’t hear you. You took my hearing aids. I’m deaf. Please put them back in. There’s a little button on the back of the casing, hold it down until you hear a beep and then put them in.”

Clint waits and waits, hoping that they didn’t ditch his aids or crush them out of fear for a tracking device. He breathes a sigh of relief when the first aid slips in, and then tips his head over as the person puts the other one in.

“Thanks,” he says automatically, too used to Natasha or Phil slipping them in for him when he’s laid up in another hospital bed, arm casted and clumsy.

“Don’t thank me just yet, Clint.”

Fuck. _Fuck._

“Natasha?! What the fuck is going on? Where am I? Did they get you too?”

His relief is all-encompassing. Natasha will make this right. They will get out. And _then_ he can figure out what the fuck happened to his eyes.

But his hope dies before it’s fully formed when Natasha laughs. He knows that laugh — it’s ice cold and promises nothing but pain. Clint ignores his automatic shiver — more than a few long, _awesome_ nights have started with that laugh. 

“What- Nat, what’s going on?”

“You asked for this. Remember? You said I could do whatever I wanted — that you trusted me. Do you still trust me, Clint?”

Clint swallows, nodding. He _does_. If nothing else, he trusts Nat. But his eyes _burn_ , and the instinctual panic to waking up without either of his two most critical senses still has him on high alert. He wishes he could track her movements. His eyes flick back and forth, automatic. It feels like someone dropped hot coals under his eyelids and the black isn’t letting up even a little. 

“I’m taking you up on that, Clint.” She traces a long nail over his closed eyelid, pressing just hard enough to make the pain jump up a notch. “I want you helpless.”

Shit. Shit. Shit. 

Nat has some pretty fucked up fantasies, Clint knows. He’s come with her whispering them into his ear more than once, and when he’d given her permission to do _anything_ , the mix of fear and excitement had kept Clint turned on for _days_. But then time had gone by and nothing extraordinary had happened — just more of the same. 

Natasha moves away again. He hears the clink of metal and gulps, picturing her kit. Excitement drops deep into his belly. Keeping his face oriented towards where he thinks she is, Clint waits. He can hear her picking up items and setting them back down, can imagine her weighing a gun in her hand, testing a knife against the hair on her arm. Watching Nat get ready for a mission is the biggest tease, and Clint always has to work extra hard to keep his headspace leveled out. 

Clint can feel when Natasha returns, the heat of her familiar body radiating towards him. He tilts his chin up, wishing he could see her, relishing in the fact that he can’t. She’s got the power, here. Clint is hers. 

The cold kiss of a blade on his neck has Clint’s pulse stuttering. The tip drags down, just hard enough to leave a scratch. It rests in the hollow of his neck for a moment, before Natasha pulls it down, her other hand tugging his shirt taut. 

The sound of ripping fabric and Clint’s breathing is all that he can hear. Natasha is silent. 

Piece by piece, she cuts his clothes away until he’s naked. The room is cold, goosebumps rise on his flesh. 

“I’m going to keep you like this,” she says. “Helpless.” The knife presses into his chest, cold then hot as the skin breaks. “In the dark. Maybe I’ll let you have your hearing aids. Maybe I won’t.” 

Clint’s breath shudders out of him, thinking back to waking up in the dark, unable to hear, unable to see. His eyes still burn. But Nat wouldn’t blind him, not permanently. 

...would she?

“You’re mine,” her voice is a growl. A shiver shakes him. “You don’t need to be able to do anything but lie there and take what I give you. You don’t have to be able to _see_.” The knife drags up his chest. Clint whimpers, used to staying quiet, feeling the blood well up. “You don’t have to be able to _talk_.” The knife stops at the base of his throat, starts to push. Sparks are shooting through Clint’s skin; blood is starting to rush in his ears. Suddenly, Nat’s hand is pressing at the base of his ear, nail digging into his skin. “You don’t have to _hear_.” 

The knife goes back to his chest. It’s wet with blood. It digs in under his right pec, where his top surgery scars are. Natasha digs in, follow the path of the scalpel. Clint gasps, pain coming in and out in waves, the nerves fucked in the scar tissue. 

“Already scarred,” Natasha tsks. Her voice is icy cold and smooth as silk. “Maybe I’ll cut you until no one else could want you, until no one would even want to look at you.”

Clint’s heart rabbits under Natasha’s blade. He imagines it — Natasha cutting until every inch of him is scarred. It’s a wonder anyone wants to look at him now, that would be the end of it. Natasha could lock him away, and no one would miss him. Why the fuck would they?

Her thumb presses over the wound on his sternum, moving through the blood. “This is all you’re good for. To hurt because I want you to hurt.” 

The knife lowers to his leg, the flat of it pressing his thighs apart, opening up the most vulnerable part of himself to her. 

“Natasha,” he tries to say, but his voice catches in his throat as the knife moves closer to his cock. 

“You don’t have to feel pleasure,” she whispers. The knife inches closer and then suddenly she whirls away. Clint loses all sense of position with the loss of her body heat, and he spirals in the dark. 

Maybe Nat really will keep him here. Maybe that’s what it means to be Natasha’s sub. 

Suddenly, liquid is hitting the open wounds on his chest. Pain roars outwards, consuming his senses. Clint screams until Nat grabs his jaw, nails digging into his cheeks. She tilts his chin back and forces his mouth open. Liquid pours into his mouth. _Vodka_ , Clint thinks, and that’s almost reassuring, only it’s coming too fast and he can’t swallow and he can’t breathe and he still can’t fucking _see_. 

He pulls at his wrists as hard as he can, rope burning against his skin, rubbing him raw. And it just keeps _coming_ until tears are coming out of his eyes, which only makes them hurt all the worse. 

And then Natasha’s gone again, and Clint is alone in the dark, liquid pouring out his nose, ears aching, and chest heaving. He can’t hear anything but the pounding of his own heart. 

Metal presses against his knee, the familiar touch of a gun. The safety clicks off. 

“Maybe, when we’re done here, I’ll blow your kneecaps out. You won’t need them anyway, not for me to keep you. Not good for anything. Scarred up. Ugly. I’ll be the only one who’ll take you. Nothing more than a sub to put down when I need to. Something I keep locked away. Just a thing.”

Clint’s hands ball and he closes his non-functioning eyes. He _knew_ this was in there. Somewhere, deep down, he knew that she didn’t love or want like other people. And maybe that’s okay because he never learned how to do that either, not really. Maybe growing up being kicked around like a piece of shit means they fit together. Broken in ways that make them fit together. Jagged bits of glass. Edges sharp but interlocking.

Fuck, he hopes that’s the case because if it’s not, this might not end the way he wants. The pool of arousal grows, but the cold in the pit of his stomach does, too. Clint trusts her, but she’s terrifying. He doesn’t know where the scene begins and ends, and his head is spinning in ways that have nothing to do with the alcohol or the drugs in his system.

The muzzle of the gun pulls away from his knee and hears it thunk down on a table somewhere nearby. There’s the zip of rope against rope, and then her hands are on him, pulling him roughly this way and that. She ties above and below the calf, making sure that he can’t move his knees even a fraction of an inch. He’s suddenly aware that the room is cold as the air hits his cunt and his cock where it stands out from between his folds. 

The pain is still intense, but being held open like this is _hot_ , and it helps to counteract some of the nausea that’s making his stomach roll. He’s so focused on his new positioning, hoping that this might take a turn for the pleasurable, that he’s surprised in the worst way when Natasha brings her tawse down hard across the inside of his thigh. 

He screams again but clenches his jaw after the first hit to keep his voice in check. And for the first thirty seconds he does relatively well, but goddamn it _hurts_ , and even Barney didn’t hurt him like this. It hurts, hurts, _hurts_ , and she’s not stopping.

The coppery tang of blood is strong in his nose. He can feel it cracking and flaking off of his chest where it has started to dry. He tries to ground himself in those things, but soon there’s nothing left but the tawse. He screams and screams and screams until he throws up. It hurts so bad he thinks his thighs have to be bleeding, and the sting of his stomach acid on his raw skin burns — makes the slap wet, makes it so much worse. 

She stops abruptly, leaving Clint reeling in his chair. Dimly, he’s aware that the tawse has landed somewhere, but when she grabs him by the hair and jerks his head back, he starts anyway. Her lips are soft against the skin of his neck, and he shudders.

“No matter how loud you scream, there’s no one but you and me. Do you realize that yet?”

Clint swallows and tells himself that he’s still safe with her, that this is all a game — a game he asked to play. But where earlier he had been certain, now he feels like the words are empty and meaningless, like the prayer he learned in that stupid group home as a kid. Praying to a god that isn’t real and is never coming to save him.

She lets go of his neck, and his head sags in relief and fear. If she’s not there, she can’t hurt him. But if she’s not there, then he’s alone. In the dark. He can’t decide which one is more terrifying.

Nat makes the decision for him.

He feels the knife drag down the inside of his burning thigh, digging in under the skin just to the side of his kneecap. The muscles in his arms and legs tense and flex, his neck strains, his abs are rock hard, and he _fights_. But she has him held tight and he can do nothing but scream into the darkness.

Finally, she stops, and the bright flare of pain begins to ebb to something he can bear.

“Mine,” she whispers, and Clint’s stomach drops. 

She’s not done.

Natasha starts on the other knee, and Clint’s heart hammers in his chest and he can’t catch his breath. He’s suffered worse, of course he has, but blacking out from pain is blacking out from pain. He can feel his head swimming; he can feel the nausea from the impending syncope building in his stomach; his head lolls to one side.

And then she stops.

“Don’t be such a baby, Clint. If you can’t handle this, what good are you to me? What good would you be to anyone? Stop screaming and be still.”

Clint’s eyes are still closed tightly, the burning in them almost negligible next to the burning cuts on his chest and knees. All he can hear is his ragged breathing.

But even as bad as it hurts, he trusts her, and god does he want to be good for her. He wants to endure. Wants to be man enough. Wants to be strong enough to give her what she wants. So he breathes and waits and says nothing about a safeword.

She’s away from him for a second and an hour. Clint can’t tell — his sense of time is lost without his sight and anything to ground him from the pain. But he hears her move, finally, and there’s the clink of her knife hitting something else as she drops it with the other things in her kit. 

Fuck. It’s the gun.

He hears the soft scrape of the heavy metal on the wooden tabletop, and safety clicks off again.

“You thought I’d forgotten. You’d hoped, hadn’t you? Maybe hoped that I changed my mind, but I don’t do that, do I? I don’t forget, do I?”

Clint swallows and tries to breathe. Nat isn’t going to hurt him like this. This isn’t like the movies. Gunshots are fatal more often than not. That it would be a knee shot rather than a chest shot doesn’t matter. He’s no good to her dead. He tries to hold on to that, but he can’t stop the tremors in his hands, and he’s glad that she can’t see them because they’re still tied behind his back.

Her lips brush his ear. “Do I?” she whispers, and Clint realizes that he never answered her question.

He shakes his head and tries to swallow again. “No, no you don’t do that,” he answers. He’s surprised to hear that his voice is steady — it should be an octave higher and breaking on every word.

“Good, Clintka,” she murmurs gently, and for a minute, Clint can breathe again. 

The gun rubs lightly over his cheek, caressing his jawline and down his neck. The pet name is like a blanket. It’s her. It’s _Natasha_. She’s who she was before she drugged him and threw him in a van. It’s okay. It’s going to be _okay_.

She pulls back and backhands him across the face with the gun in her hand. It’s somewhere between being punched and slapped, and his head snaps to the side. He can feel the blood run down his cheek where the skin split under his eye.

He doesn’t have time to think anything other _FuckIt’sNotOverIt’sNotOverIt’sNotOver_ before she hits him with her other hand, snapping his head back to the other side. At least that hand doesn’t have the gun in it, so it just stings. She continues hitting him with her off hand — forehand, backhand, back and forth until his head is throbbing in time with his heartbeat and his face feels as raw and aching as his thighs. 

There are tears on his face. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise, even as unmanly as it feels. And he wants those tears to be because she hit his nose a couple of times, he really does, but it’s getting to be too much. He needs this to stop. He needs her to tell him that it’s all just a game and that she loves him, tell him that he’s a good sub and she’d never shoot out his knees. But she doesn’t, and being scared that he’s going to die doesn’t hurt as much as the thought that she doesn’t need him anymore, doesn’t _want_ him anymore. So the tears run down his face, and he tries to muffle his sobs with grunts of pain as she hits him and hits him and hits him.

She stops when he can’t play off the sobs as anything else. There are several long moments where nothing happens, and she has to be watching, evaluating, deciding. The thought that she has to choose whether or not she wants him anymore is agonizing. He takes several deep breaths which make his head throb, but at least he manages to get the embarrassing hitching noises under control. 

“Look at you. You’re a mess, but you love it don’t you.”

Clint shakes his head and the room spins. “Please, Nat. Please. I need—”

“I know what you need,” Natasha says, voice a purr. She walks around him and then he feels her hands on his wrists and _yes_ , they’re finally done, it’s finally over. 

She tugs the rope off roughly, rubbing over already raw skin, and Clint hisses through his teeth. But he can make it, just a little more he tells himself. She places his hands on his knees, pressing them into the broken flesh so that Clint can feel the fresh wave of blood. He chokes back a sob, arching up towards her. 

Then she lifts his left hand and places it on a table. Clint wonders where the table came from when he was so sure it was farther away and misses his chance to pull back as Natasha straps his hand down at the wrist. His right hand flies to the restraint, and he fumbles to free himself, but before he can, Nat jams her Widow’s Bite hard into the side of his neck and his whole body seizes. 

Fuck. Being tased _sucks_. He grits his teeth, tries to ride it out silently. The shock seems to last forever, but he knows from experience that the discharge only lasts five seconds. He’s distracted from the pain so much so that even though he recovers nearly immediately, he doesn’t get it together to fight back until it’s too late and his hand is already strapped down.

“I owe you more than a quick zap for fighting me, but I’m sure this will make up for it. You’re mine, Clint. _Mine_.”

She moves abruptly out of his space and the panic sets in deep. He pulls back, trying to distance himself from the table and whatever the hell is about to happen. He leans his weight against the back of the chair for leverage, and he’s suddenly held fast as Nat tightens a strap around his chest, holding him fast against the chair. 

He realizes he’s trapped like this now and he’s got no leverage anymore. His arms are held out at full extension, and he’s got no slack to ease the ache that’s already setting in.

Natasha’s lips brush the shell of his ear, and he shudders. “When I’m done with you, you’re going to be worthless to anyone but me. You won’t have a place at SHIELD anymore. You won’t have a place anywhere except where I put you. I’ve already blinded you and now I’m going to break your fingers. You’re going to _need_ me, and I’m going to be all you get. Do you understand that? Do you know now what it means to be mine? I own you, Clint. Inside and out. Forever.”

Fear shoots through Clint. She’s serious. How the fuck is she serious? His fingers scrabble against the rough wooden tabletop. He pulls and thrashes, but the bonds just dig into his calves, his chest, his wrists. Somewhere in his mind, he can hear someone telling him to _calm the fuck down and focus_. And he wants to, he does, but she’s going to break his fucking fingers, and he needs to get out of here _Right. Now._

She drags her nails painfully along his scalp and then yanks his head back until his neck is fully extended. 

“I want you to pay attention,” she whispers. “Listen closely, because your screams are going to be the last thing you ever hear. And I want you to remember what they sound like because that’s how you can remember what it means to be mine when I take your hearing aids, too.”

“No, Nat. Please, please don’t do this. I need my hands. _I need my eyes, my ears!_ Don’t do this to me. Don’t—” 

But Nat already has his left index finger held out straight and flat against the table with a pair of channel locks. She doesn’t pause or draw out the moment, just swings the hammer and pain explodes through his hand. And he screams just like she said he would, but not because a broken finger was so excruciating. Yeah, broken fingers hurt like hell, but he’s had plenty. It’s the fear, the desolation, the panic, and screaming is the only outlet he has for any of it.

His heart is beating wildly, and he knows he’s on the edge of a panic attack. The pain is receding his in hand, and he should focus. There’s something important about the pain in his hand, but he can’t. 

And then there’s hands on his head, Nat gripping his head and holding him in place. 

“Please don’t take them, Nat. Please. I’m begging you. Let me keep my hearing.” He doesn’t even hear the end of his own plea before she’s pulled both out and he’s left reeling in darkness and silence. 

She lets him go and then all he has is the pain, the bonds that dig into his bare skin, the blood-soaked socks that squish when he wiggles his toes in his boots, the unfinished wood of the table under his hands. She’s gone. He loses all sense of orientation when Nat lets go of him. All he knows is the throbbing where blood still oozes from the larger cuts, and he uses it to count his heartbeat. He makes it to 1211 before he loses his place. He tries to figure out how long it’s been if his resting heart-rate is about 65, but the math is too much, and he gets tangled up in the numbers. By the time he gives up, he doesn’t have any idea how long he’s spent trying to calculate or count, and he feels even more lost than before.

The darkness feels like a well of thick, black water swirling and rising around the room. He feels like at any moment it’s going to wash over him, drown him. It’s going to get into his ears and his nose and his mouth and then his lungs. He has to get it off. GetItOffGetItOffGetItOFF!!!!

He thrashes again more harshly, the ropes around his legs rubbing him raw. He can hear the waves lapping against the walls and Barney is standing in the corner of the room, unaffected by the rising water.

“You always wanted to be a man. How’s it feel, ya little freak? It working out the way you wanted?”

Clint screams and screams and screams, but he can’t make a sound. And the waves are crashing so loud now. It sounds like a squall, not that he has some vast body of seafaring knowledge, but hey, he’s seen a lot of that stupid lobster show and the ocean is loud. And then there’s a hand on his face, and he can’t hear his voice, but he yells anyway.

“Pull me up! Pull me up! I’m gonna drown out here!” 

Fingers gently touch his ear and something slips inside and he can hear and the ocean sounds stop but he can still _see_ it. 

“Please, please! I can’t tread water in a storm like this, you gotta help me!” he begs.

“Shh,” a voice soothes. “It’s okay, Clint. It’s okay. I’ve got you. I’ve got you. I’m not gonna let you drown, okay? Lemme put your other BTE in. Easy.”

And he realizes it’s Nat. Of course, it’s Nat. She always saves him in the end. Or does she? Something niggles in the back of his mind, and he flexes his hands, and it all comes back.

“Don’t!” he screams. “No more. No more, Nat! Please. Red. It’s red. Please, I need to be done.”

Her hands are gentle on his face again, wiping away tears and softly stroking his hair the way she always does to put him down. “We’re done, Clintka. We’re done. You were so good for me. So strong. I’m proud.”

She continues to stroke him until his breathing evens out a bit more. “Good. Tip your head back for me and open your eyes. I’m going to touch them, but I won’t hurt you. Leave them open.”

Clint can’t think enough to do anything other than what’s she telling him to, so he obeys. It’s a matter of a few seconds, and she’s peeling the contacts off his eyes — that must be what those things are — and he can _see_. The light is blinding after all the darkness, and wow, fuck, his eyes haven’t been dilated like this since that damn SHIELD physical. But none of that matters because his eyes _work_.

“Keep them open. I’m going to help you rinse with saline. You can blink as I pour to help clear them out,” she instructs. 

The saline is cold, and the blinking still irritates something in his eyes, but the rinsing helps and he can’t ever remember feeling so grateful in his life. 

“Now how about we untie you and get you cleaned up, yeah?” Nat says. It’s not really a question, Clint knows that much, so he nods.

Part of him really wants to punch her in the face and bolt. But he’s dizzy and tired, naked and lost. Not only would he not get far, but logically he knows (hopes?) that she’s no longer a threat. 

He looks around the room while she fiddles with the rope and buckles on the restraints. He thinks he might have been here before, but he’s not certain. If he has, the place has been significantly remodeled since he last saw it. But it would be mean they’re in Newark if it’s the safehouse he’s thinking of.

He’s untied before he realizes it and she drags him to his feet and across the room to a cot that had been out of his line of sight before. His knees pulse angrily, and his thighs burn. Clint risks a glance down and chokes back a wave of nausea — his legs are a bloody mess and blood has dried and crusted on his chest. He’s still reeling from everything that’s happened, and the fear and panic are swirling unhappily through his head. 

He shakes as Nat lies him down on the cot. Thanks to the chair he’d been in, his back is relatively unscathed, but his whole body aches. Natasha pulls away, and Clint lets her go. His brain screams at him, wanting her close, wanting her gone, and he flinches when she comes back into view. Her face goes a little steely, and Clint shrinks back automatically, cursing himself for it. 

“I’m going to clean you up,” she explains. She’s carrying a med kit, which she sets down on the bed beside his head. Clint can’t look away from her. He feels like maybe he’s seen her for the very first time, and what he’s seen scares him. 

He loves her. He loves that she wants to hurt him, loves to hurt for her. But not like this — not alone in the dark convinced that he’s been reduced to nothing, not threats to take away his independence, his _life_ , which he’s spent so long building for himself. His throat gets tight, and his whole body jumps when her hand comes into his vision. 

“Clintka,” she says softly, something in her voice that Clint hasn’t heard before. “I’m just going to dress your wounds, alright?”

Doubt, Clint thinks. She’s feeling doubt. Some small, vicious part of him screams _good_ , she should be feeling doubt. But another part of him points out that this is all his fault — he’s the one who refused to discuss limits, who told her that she could do _anything_ to him and it would be okay. He knew, he’s always known, that Nat isn’t like other people. It’s what he loves about her. But now? Now, it terrifies him. 

He holds very still as she rinses his wounds with saline. They don’t speak. 

In fact, not another word is said until the bandages are tied off, the med kit swept away, and Nat tries to climb into bed next to him. Suddenly very aware of his nudity, of his exhaustion and weakness, Clint says, “No! No don’t —” without even thinking about it. The reaction is instinctual. He has no defense against her, and he’s too weak to take anymore right now. 

Hurt flashes through her eyes before her face goes blank. Guilt wells up in Clint, just one more thing in the fucking mess of emotion in his head. “I’m sorry,” he whispers, confused and hurting. “Can I — can you help me get dressed, please?”

She nods, expression even. She collects carefully folded sweatpants. Her hands are unexpectedly gentle, and the touch of her fingers on his skin as she pulls the distressingly soft material over his abused flesh is enough to bring tears to his eyes. He wipes them away angrily. She stays crouched on the ground, between his legs, so that he’s looking down at her. 

“You scared me,” he whispers, voice rough from screaming. 

“I know,” she says. 

“It went too far.”

“I know,” she repeats. 

And then, with enough honesty that threatens a fresh wave of tears, “I’m not sure how we fix this.”

Her expression is troubled — it’s a gift, that she lets him see, and he knows that. She reaches up and cups his cheek, bruised and tender, but less painful than the rest of his body. 

“I love you,” she says. Clint can count on one hand the number of times she’s told him that. He closes his eyes and leans his cheek into her hand. 

“We’re fucked up,” he says. “Both of us. So goddamn fucked up.”

She leans in and kisses his cheek, the bridge of his nose. Nat’s never tender with him like that, except when it’s like this — when she’s hurt him so much that there’s no mistaking tenderness for weakness. Clint’s chest aches. It’s hard to breathe behind the wall of feeling and confusion. 

“We need help,” he says. “We need to fix this.” 

“Whatever you need, Clintka,” she murmurs, her accent thick the way it becomes when she really lets people _see_ her. He opens his eyes. Her expression is honest. 

“I need to sleep,” he finally says. “And then we’ll call Phil.”

“We’ll call Phil,” she agrees quietly. 

He nods, feeling his tender flesh against her cool hand. Somehow they have to fix this. They have to fix the fear that’s sitting in Clint’s belly, the cautious waver in Nat’s hands. He loves her too much for any other option.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sensory deprivation can have profound effects on a person after only a short period of time. Hallucinations are one of the most common early effects.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 2: Negotiation

The call comes just as Phil is exiting the SHIELD field office in Manhattan. He’s exhausted and irritated, having woken up at three that morning to the shrill sound of his work phone. A mission had gone sideways due to some rookie mistakes, and Nick had called Phil in to deal with the aftermath. 

But the call comes on his personal phone from a blocked number, which almost always means Natasha, so he picks up with a tired, “Coulson.”

There’s a long pause as Phil walks towards his car, never a good sign with Natasha. “We need help,” she says, then rattles off an address before abruptly hanging up. Phil blinks down at his phone, processing. He can count on one hand the number of times Natasha has explicitly asked for help. It usually meant someone was bleeding out. 

On autopilot, Phil climbs into his car, plugs the address into his GPS device and sets off. He keeps his mind still, knowing better than to panic. Natasha is more than capable, and she’d said _we_ , which implied that Clint was with her. The two of them together could find their way into some pretty messy situations, but they could also usually get themselves out of it. Still, he’s not stingy with the gas, going as fast he can without the risk of getting pulled over. 

The drive to Newark is usually a little more than an hour. Phil makes it in 45 minutes, pulling up outside a rather dilapidated looking house. The houses around it are in similar states of disrepair, signs of a neighborhood fluctuating in and out of poverty all around. It’s not one of the safe houses of Natasha’s that he’s familiar with, but that doesn’t surprise him. Natasha’s the sort of person who has about ten different possible escape routes at any given moment. It’s been barely a year since Clint brought her into SHIELD, and Phil knows that she doesn’t trust any of them completely yet. Even with Clint, she’s cautious, carefully testing the boundaries of all her relationships. 

Phil walks up to the door and knocks briskly five times. After a pause, he knocks two more times. The door creaks open slowly. Natasha’s standing there, dressed casually. There’s blood on the sleeves of her shirt. Phil scans her quickly, checking for injury, but she seems to be in one piece. 

She steps aside without a word, letting him into the house. The inside is in much better condition than the outside, Phil isn’t surprised to see. But the walls are plain and the furnishing minimal. Neither Natasha nor Clint requires much in the way of stuff to make a place comfortable. She leads him to a back room, not saying a word. Phil follows suit, though anxiety is building under his skin. Something seems not quite right, and he can’t put a finger on what’s wrong. 

Natasha opens a door, lets him step in first. Phil pauses on the threshold. Clint’s lying on a cot in the corner, eyes closed though Phil can tell from here he’s not asleep. His face is red and swollen, he’s got the beginning of a black eye, a split lip that’s just barely scabbed over, and mottled bruising on his cheeks. 

Clean, white bandages are wrapped around his chest. Phil takes a deep breath and scans the room — the chair bolted to the floor, the heavy table on wheels with restraints nailed to the surface. Natasha’s work kit is cleanly laid out on another table. Blood stained ropes sit in a coil on the chair, and the floor shows signs of a hasty but thorough cleaning. 

Once more, Phil breathes in through his nose, trying to calm himself. He crosses the room without saying a word and crouches down beside the bed, so he’s at eye level with Clint. Clint’s eyes flutter open — they’re red and watery, the eyelids puffy and tender looking. 

Phil doesn’t touch him. Quickly he sorts out his thoughts, creating a plan of attack. “What’s your pain level?” 

Clint’s voice is rough, like he’s been screaming, when he replies, “Seven.” Phil blinks instead of wincing — Clint has a ridiculously high pain tolerance and for him to call something a seven is no joke. 

“And how’s your headspace?”

“Shitty,” Clint admits, closing his eyes again. Phil breathes in, mindful and measured. 

“Did you give her permission to do this?” 

Clint nods, wincing as he does. “Was my fault,” he mutters after a moment. “She wanted to negotiate, and I said we didn’t need it — I thought.” Clint stops, sucking his bottom lip into his mouth, flinching as he remembers it’s split open. 

Phil sits back on his heels and glances back at Natasha. Her expression is steely, almost entirely closed off, but Phil knows her. There’s something in her eyes — fear, Phil wants to say, or anger. The two run close in everyone, but especially in Nat. 

“Did she listen to your safeword?” Phil asks Clint, still studying Nat. 

“Didn’t safeword,” Clint mumbles. 

“We’ve talked about that,” Phil replies, turning back to Clint, whose eyes are open now. He attempts a sheepish smile when Phil looks at him. “You must protect yourself, Clint. Doing things just because that’s what the dom wants isn’t safe or healthy.”

Clint had always had that tendency, as long as Phil’s known him. Even in the couple of years that Phil dommed for Clint, it took Clint a long time to say no to anything. And Phil had always been cautious about giving orders with Clint and had never done anything more than what was necessary to get Clint to headspace. 

“I know,” Clint sighs. Phil gives him a bit of a look. “I do,” Clint says more quietly. “I just — I want to give her everything.” 

Both directions, Phil acknowledges. They both fucked this one up, it seems. Natasha might have taken things too far, but Clint didn’t stop her or take any precautions. Natasha doesn’t have normal boundaries, clear in Phil’s interactions with her and in the psych evals that land on his desk. And Clint...Clint struggles to say no, especially to people he cares about. Further, Clint has a messy relationship with pain. Even in their professional, platonic scenes, Clint usually needed some amount of pain to get down. That’s typical enough — most subs do. Clint could take a lot of pain — _liked_ to take a lot of pain. The problem was that once Clint started, it stopped being about what he enjoyed and turned into what he could prove to his dom. That’s where it got dangerous — when he stopped honoring his limits.

Pursing his lips, Phil looks back and forth between them. If it were any other two people in the world, Phil might say it wasn’t even worth trying to make a relationship. Their needs and wants and, yes, their neuroses, meant that they were perfectly aligned to do maximum damage to each other. But they’re also perfectly aligned to understand one another in ways that no one else might ever be able to. He knows that they need this, that they need each other, that they deserve a chance at a loving relationship for once in their lives.

“If you want to make this work,” he says softly, standing, “You are going to have to do a lot of work. You are going to have to check and double check consent. You’re going to have to negotiate and plan scenes — all of them. Neither of you can trust the other to know when to stop.” He pauses, glances back over Clint, the way he’s laying, the way he’s holding himself. There are injuries Phil can’t see, he knows, but there always are with Clint. “And if that’s what you want to do, it starts now. Safewords and limits established by the end of the week. And I’m going to check in about this,” Phil says. It’s beyond his role as their handler, and well beyond what he needs or wants to know about their relationship, but a layer of accountability is going to be necessary here. 

Phil _wants_ them to succeed, he really does, and if he has to help in this way to make that possible, he’s more than willing. 

*

Clint lays alone in the cot for a while Phil takes Nat out of the room. He takes his BTEs out. He doesn’t want to know what they’re saying. It’s been a long fucking night? Day? Jesus, he realizes he doesn’t even know how long it’s been and that alone makes him feel more tired than before. It doesn’t take much to fall asleep again.

He comes to with a start and a half-cocked fist aimed right at Phil’s face. Phil has his hands up in surrender, and his lips are moving quickly. Clint relaxes somewhat and signs to Phil that he doesn’t have his BTEs in. Phil nods and wait patiently as Clint fumbles with the tiny buttons and drops it while trying to get it into his ear, but he doesn’t offer to help. Clint’s always appreciated that about Phil — he doesn’t touch unless he’s been invited to. He knows he can trust Phil even though everything else feels off-kilter.

Finally, he gets them in and struggles to a sitting position, his legs aching horribly and the wounds on his chest and knees throbbing.

“Hey,” Clint says. 

“Hey,” Phil replies. “So Nat’s out for a while. She won’t come back until I tell her to. She’ll bring takeout when she does. You got anything you think you could stomach right now?”

“Pizza,” Clint mumbles. 

“Of course,” Phil says dryly. “I’ll text her. I take it she knows your preferences?”

Clint nods and looks down at his hands. Nat _does_ know his preferences, so how could things have gone so terribly wrong? Pressing his lips together, Clint feels his split lip crack and start to bleed again. He listens to the _tap tap_ of Phil’s thumbs against his phone screen and experimentally flexes the finger that Nat “broke.” It fucking hurts but he’s had sprains worse than this. It freaks him out more than a little to think about what she did, but realizing that it was a game — truly an act, at least in that way — helps him feel less victimized, less helpless, less like he trusted a monster… again.

“Alright. Now, you said that your headspace was ‘shitty.’ Do you need to go down?”

Fuck. Yes he _needs_ it, but he doesn’t _want_ it. It’s the last thing he wants right now. He doesn’t want to have to trust anyone else right now. He doesn’t want anyone else in his head. He just wants to take a handful of Advil and pass the fuck out. 

He pinches the bridge of his nose, which seems like the part only of his face that doesn’t hurt like hell from all the slapping. It’s tempting to tell Phil no, that a good night’s sleep will fix him right up, but he takes a deep breath and tries to be honest with himself. Waking up dropping tomorrow would only make him feel worse. 

“Yeah, I probably need to go down.”

Phil nods, face still and quiet, never offering judgment on Clint’s assessment of himself. How long had Phil had to do that before Clint realized that he wasn’t just another dom trying to control every aspect of Clint? Months. Years, maybe. 

Clint thought he could trust Nat the same way he trusts Phil. But maybe that was naive.  
“I don’t think you should go down in here,” Phil says quietly. “There’s a bedroom down the hall that will be more comfortable. How does that sound?”

Clint nods, keeping his gaze away from Nat’s work kit and the bloody ropes on the floor. Accidentally, his eyes sweep over the table, restraints flipped open. He shivers, and his pain ticks up a notch. “Yeah, alright. Help me walk?”

“Of course.”

Phil carefully wraps an arm around Clint’s back and helps him stand. Clint’s not the touchy-feely type, never has been. Growing up with Barney for a big brother meant that all the loving family touching he got was another fist to the gut. But he can’t lie to himself and say that Phil isn’t warm and comforting against his side while they gingerly pad down the hall. Phil’s touch is familiar and trusted — proven to be safe year after year. Of all the doms Clint’s ever had, Phil’s the only one who’s never abused that trust.

It’s only about twenty feet from the cot to the bed, but his pants rub on his raw thighs enough that he’s biting back tears and hissing by the time Phil helps him onto the bed. 

“What’s wrong with your legs?” he asks.

“Knife, tawse,” Clint answers shortly, breathing through his nose. He doesn’t let himself think about the unexpected crack of leather on his bare thighs, doesn’t let himself think about the dark room and the ropes biting into his skin, tries to get the sound of his own wrecked screaming out of his ears. 

“Level of injury?” Phil demands softly.

Clint shrugs and a sharp pain lances across his chest. He lets his body get still — now that he’s settled, there’s no need to move until Phil needs him to. Clint’s never had a problem holding still — when you’re hurt, it’s the best thing to do. It was the first lesson he ever learned, how to hold still and keep quiet when someone came for you. Leaning back against the pillows, Clint answers, “Raw where she whipped me. I think. Didn’t really get a good look.”

“Did she treat it?”

Clint nods. “Yeah, rubbed some kinda cream all over it. Fucking hurt.”

“Good. And the knife wounds?”

Clint thinks back, but he can’t say for sure. “She didn’t suture anything that I remember. Don’t know what it looks like, but it felt awful. Still feels awful.”

“Alright, well I would like to check under your bandages to make sure that everything is treated properly.”

It goes unsaid by Phil that he’ll have to take his pants back off for that, his only layer of protection and privacy at the moment. Still, knees seem important, and he can’t think up a reason not to let Phil check to be sure. Saying “I’m still kinda terrified and my pants are sorta like a security blanket right now” doesn’t pass the manliness test, so he just nods and fumbles with the drawstring that he didn’t tie.

Phil offers a hand and Clint takes it, pulling himself up. His whole body screams at him, protesting the movement. 

Phil lets Clint deal with his pants on his own, a quiet sign of respect that makes Clint’s throat go tight. Once they’re over his hips, the sweats fall to the ground easily enough, and he lets himself flop back to sitting on the bed. 

“What are your safewords?” Phil asks quietly.

“Red, yellow, green,” Clint says.

“Good,” Phil praises. “And when should you use your safeword?”

“I should use my safeword if I feel physically, mentally, or emotionally overwhelmed in a bad or previously unagreed upon manner. I should use my safeword if I feel like I’m in danger. I should use my safeword if I feel like my dom is compromised and may endanger me. My dom or I can use our safewords at any time without retribution or negotiation,” Clint recites from memory. 

Phil nods. “Good. Now sit still for me while I check your injuries.” 

Clint settles back into stillness, watching as Phil takes his suit jacket off and rolls up his sleeves before squatting in front Clint. His hands are gentle as he unwraps the gauze around Clint’s knees, and Clint enjoys being cared for by someone who wouldn’t want to do anything to him even if he asked. He closes his eyes and tries to relax enough to bring his pain levels down a bit, but no matter what Phil does he can’t help but make it worse. Still, it doesn’t take long before Phil’s gently reapplying the gauze, and the throbbing begins to subside.

“Good job. I know that hurt. She glued the cuts; they appear to be superficial anyway. I assume that she did the same on your chest, so I’ll leave those bandages alone.”

Clint nods and looks at his thighs. They’re not really as bad as he remembers. They were bloody and raw before, but now they’re just badly chafed and a livid purple. It takes him a second to figure it out, his brain could really use some glucose right about now, but then it occurs to him that the blood probably came from his chest. 

He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and reminds himself that none of this is as bad as Nat made it seem. The cuts were all superficial. His finger isn’t broken. His legs aren’t raw and bloody. He’s hurt — cut, bruised, tased, drugged, and a little jacked up on sensory deprivation — but Nat never really harmed him. He breathes that knowledge in for a minute before he opens his eyes. Phil is still squatting in front of him, observing carefully.

Without speaking, Phil offers a hand to Clint, pulling him to standing. Clint balances on wobbly legs while Phil carefully pulls his sweats up to a level where Clint can reach the waistband and finish the job himself. This time Clint lowers himself gently to the bed, having learned the error of his ways from the last time. Phil takes a seat beside him.

“I won’t hurt you to put you down today. You’ve had quite enough of that for now, I think. Instead, we’re going to move you to a chair. You’re tense from the restraints. I’m going to rub that out. It will feel good but may also hurt. Do you understand?”

Clint nods and Phil clears his throat. “Yes, I understand,” Clint answers.

“Good, Clint. Remember all consent must be verbal. Safewords don’t have to be. Now, do you consent?” Phil asks.

“I consent.”

“What specifically do you consent to?” Phil prompts.

Clint sighs. Phil had safety protocols out the ass for him when Phil was his dom, but he’s clearly making a point tonight. “I consent to a neck, back, and shoulder rub.”

“Good,” Phil answers. “Let me grab a chair from the kitchen. Stay where you are.”

Clint looks down. His wrists and ankles are far more raw than his thighs are, but they don’t hurt nearly as bad. He tries to think, not of any particular thing, just enough to grapple some of what’s happened into submission, but he can’t focus on anything long enough to grasp the threads. He can’t even decide if the lack of focus is due to drop or exhaustion. And is the exhaustion due to what happened or due to drop? He ends up with his elbows carefully on his knees and his face in his hands when Phil gets back. 

Clint raises his head up to watch Phil. He lays a folded blanket over the seat of the chair, padding it for Clint’s bruised thighs, and then moves it up facing the bed.

“Sit on it backward, facing away from the bed. I’m going to sit behind you,” Phil says.

Clint manages to shuffle off the bed and onto the chair without help and gets situated without jostling anything too much. The old spring mattress creaks when Phil settles behind him. 

“Hands on your shoulders,” Phil warns, and then warm palms and finger lay gently over his skin.

The skin-to-skin is so unbelievably comforting that Clint shudders. Phil seems to understand, gently rubbing his hands over Clint’s shoulders — not massaging, just touch intended to ground and soothe him. Clint closes his eyes, pressing back tears. He knows they're probably inevitable, but there’s a voice in his head that sounds a lot like Barney that's trying to convince him that men don't cry. Phil doesn't cry.

Phil takes his time. He rubs open hands slowly and softly over Clint’s shoulders and back, and bit by bit Clint relaxes into the touch. It’s only once he’s sagging his weight against the wooden frame of the chair that Phil begins to use pressure. It’s just his thumbs at first, rubbing little circles along the sides of his spine up to the base of his skull and back down to his sacrum. 

Clint sighs and sags forward, before straightening up just enough to avoid putting too much strain on his cuts on his chest. Phil’s hands move out to Clint’s lats, fingers joining thumbs in the work. Clint feels the first fuzzy bits of the hormone rush and wishes that Nat were the one rubbing his back. He realizes suddenly that he craves contact with her, reassurance that this is going to be okay even though he’s not sure that it is. 

A small groan escapes Clint and Phil clears his throat. “Clint, I’m not mad at you for what happened here, but I am worried. We spent four years as drop partners, and I’m a bit stunned to see that you took none of what we talked about to heart, though you clearly recall the information I taught you. Care to explain?”

Clint would definitely not care to explain. His head is fuzzy, and the edges of the pain are getting softer as his brain drops a ton of dopamine with his down. He blinks a few times and stares at the wall, thinking, but eventually, his concentration falters. He only realizes it when Phil clears his throat again.

“Clint. Explain to me why you ignored the foundations of a basic scene,” Phil orders. 

Clint shifts a little which is a goddamn mistake because _ow_. “I thought that it was just a ‘you’ thing. I didn’t realize I needed to repeat that stuff with every relationship. I’ve never known anyone to do that.”

“Clint, it’s not that you need to repeat it in every scene. I drilled it into you because you came to me with no healthy boundaries. You would do anything I asked, and you hadn’t stopped to even ask yourself if you were willing to do what I asked, if you wanted to. I wanted you to learn to watch out for yourself. I knew that you would eventually move on to a romantic relationship, and I wanted you to avoid this,” Phil explains.

Fuck. Clint hadn’t ever considered that the same rules applied in romance as in a platonic relationship. Movies and TV made it seem easy, organic, like it just kinda happened when it happened. Doing a big scene seemed like the next step in their relationship, but it’s starting to dawn on Clint that big things need to be well thought out. Kinda like taking on the tracksuit bros and buying an apartment building. 

“I know that’s a pretty blunt way of stating it Clint, but I don’t think we can afford any more miscommunications. Am I making sense?” Phil asks.

“Yeah, Phil. You’re making sense,” Clint says. 

“Good. We’re going to come back to this later. But I want to say this, Clint, not because I want to heap blame on anyone, it won’t do anyone any good in the long run, but because I think you need to hear it. Natasha went too far. Even though you never safeworded, it should never have gone like it did.”

Clint swallows hard. He feels validated and victimized all at once. He’s not overreacting to what happened — the panic, the fear, having to safeword — he’s not wrong about that. It helps that he feels less like the little sissy bitch Barney always made him out to be. But it also means that someone got the drop on him, someone hurt him, someone got into his head and took his deepest fears and twisted them up so tight he couldn’t think straight. And that feeling reminds him of some really awful times, dredges up a lot of shit he’s never dealt with. 

Feeling like he’s been gutted both mentally and physically combined with the tenderness of Phil’s hands is what does it. Phil knows on some level what he’s carrying. He’s never asked, but he always seems to know, and he always gives Clint the space to meet whatever it is on his own terms — without judgment, without pity. So when tears begin to drip down Clint’s face, Phil just keeps right on working the tension out of his back. When Clint’s shoulders begin to shake and he can’t stop the sobs, Phil wraps gentle arms carefully around his stomach and chest, avoiding the cuts, and setting his chin over Clint’s shoulder. 

Quietly, Phil begins to murmur in Clint’s ear. “I’ve got you, Clint. I’ve got you. You’re going to be okay. We’ll work through this. You’re tough, and you’re strong, and I’m proud of you. You’re a good man, Clint. You’re a good man.”

The reassurances are everything he wants to hear but likes to pretend he’s too strong to need. For a little while, Phil’s words make everything hurt more, make him more raw, more exposed, more vulnerable. But there’s so much there, so many things competing for his attention. Eventually, Clint runs out of steam, sagging in Phil’s arms. 

His head is heavy and it fucking throbs from crying. Whoever said that crying made you feel better was a lying asshole, Clint decides.

“Come on. Let’s lay you down for some sleep. I’ll wake you up in a couple of hours for pizza,” Phil tells him. 

Clint can’t imagine eating right now even if someone hand fed him. So he takes Phil’s cue and slides back out of the chair and onto the bed. The covers are already pulled back, and Phil covers him up, sliding in next to him and sitting on top of the blankets. A hand threads through his hair and rubs gently dragging Clint further down into headspace. 

“I’ve got watch. Sleep.”

“Thanks,” Clint says as he fumbles his BTEs out. Phil takes them and sets them on the bedside table before turning out the light.

As he closes his eyes, Clint decides that sleep and pizza will make a lot of things better.

*

Pizza and sleep help a lot. Coffee and donuts help even more. It’s clear to Clint that Phil and Nat have been up and talking already. He doesn’t need, or want, to ask. Clint trusts Phil enough to know that the things they talked about last night will stay private, that even if Nat asked (which she wouldn’t), Phil wouldn’t divulge Clint’s mini-breakdown. The least he can do is let Nat and Phil have the same privacy. 

Nat sits at the table stiffly drinking what must be her fifth cup of coffee, if the slight tremor in her hands is any indication. Phil sips his coffee and just looks tired. Clint knows what’s coming, more or less. Phil handed them their kink sheets as soon as they sat down, but Clint has no intention of even trying to read it before two cups of coffee and three donuts. Nat is too tense to even flip the pages. 

Once he’s officially among the living, Clint snags the papers off the table along with a pen, then stumbles off to the living room to sit on the sofa. He’s barely seated when Nat sits down beside him and hands him a full box of Cheerios in lieu of a clipboard. He takes it with a mumbled thanks and shifts around on the shitty sofa to get comfortable.

His body still throbs, though Clint had swallowed down the Advil Phil had left by his bedside table as soon as he woke. Just sitting down makes his legs scream and trying to find a comfortable position is murder. He’s absurdly glad that his back had been pressed up against the chair and protected from Nat’s tawse and knife. 

Fiddling the pen in his non-injured hand, Clint tries to focus on the kink sheet in front of him. The questions are really specific, and he considers just writing a giant “YES” under the section labeled “Pain Play,” but he figures that a blanket answer like that is too much like the blanket consent he gave Nat. It’s not gonna fly with any of them at this point. 

It takes them nearly an hour to write in all the little numbers and make comments next to some of the kinks. Phil has joined them in the living room and is writing something, probably another report, on his laptop. His presence reminds Clint to take this seriously. Flying through and marking everything as okay would defeat the purpose of this exercise. 

It’s unexpectedly hard, though, and takes more introspection than Clint’s really comfortable with. And then there’s the honest truth that there are things he’d do with Nat that he never would have considered before. _Dressing up for his dom_ is giving up too much — he _has_ to control his image. It’s all he has, some days. But he knows that Nat gets it. That if he ever let her pick his clothes, she would be careful. She’d make him look good. Masculine. Strong. 

He feels exhausted when he finishes, scraped raw inside and out. He has to sit still and quiet for a moment, feel the width of his shoulders against the couch, revel in the ache around his knees. 

“Your pencils are awfully quiet. When are you planning to tell each other that you’re done?” Phil asks suddenly.

Clint glances up and over, eyes flicking over Nat’s fingers wrapped delicately around the pen, the same way they wrap around a knife. 

“I’m done,” Nat concedes.

“Yeah, me too,” Clint says. They’re in this together, at least. They both have to talk about their relationship, their sex life, and all the horrible things that have happened in their lives to lead them to this level of dysfunction. And they’re going to do it in front of their boss. The boss that they call “Dad” behind his back.

Ugh.

Clint decides he hasn’t had enough coffee for this and throws the Cheerios box, pencil, and kink sheet on the coffee table and shambles into the kitchen. He comes back with the carafe and the leftover pizza.

“Well, where do we start?” Clint asks, feeling ready to get this over with and go the fuck back to bed.

Phil closes his laptop and sets it aside. “Honestly, that’s up to you two. I’m only here for oversight. You’ve got to work this out on your own.”

Fucking great. It’s the blind leading the blind. 

“Phil says we should work this out, that we can make this work if we try. I’m not sure he’s right,” Nat says.

Clint looks up and blinks. Nat looks pale but resolved. He’s seen her look like this exactly once and that mission ended up with three STRIKE team members in body bags in the back of the jet on the ride home. 

“Say that again?” he asks, still not sure what the hell just happened. She can’t be saying what he thinks she’s saying. 

“Phil says we should work this out. I don’t agree. Clint, the things I did to you… That’s who I am. That’s always been there. I’ve just been tempering it. I thought… I thought that maybe if I showed you…” she trails off and stares darkly at the floor.

Clint goes cold. He studies her for a long minute. She hurt him. She hurt him terribly, in ways that weren’t fun or hot or sexy. But it doesn’t matter. He loves her. He wants her. And he’s not at all ready to let her go. He knows they’re fucked up — knows that he should have stopped her. Fuck, he as good as challenged her to do this when he’d given her permission to do whatever. He should have expected it. He fucking _knows_ her, and he should have predicted it. 

“You think I didn’t know?” He says softly. “You think I didn’t see what you’re capable of? I wanted to be able to take it. Fuck, Nat. I wanted to be able to take anything for you.”

Natasha nods. The look of fear has been replaced by steely anger. “I thought if you could take it, it would mean I wasn’t a monster, but now we know differently. I don’t think I’m safe, Clint. I think it would be best if you went back to Phil and I used a support sub.”

“Then why did we just spend an hour filling out these fucking worksheets?” Clint demands, panic-fueled rage pounding in his veins. 

What was the point of all of this if she was just going to give up? Why the fuck did he hurt for her like that? He comforted himself with the thought of her hands on him last night, and now she’s leaving. Just like that. She broke him down to nothing, and now she’s _leaving_. What the fuck? Why is everyone fucking like this?

Clint can’t contain his anger just sitting on the sofa with her. Restless energy pulses in his veins. He drags himself painfully to his feet and mills about the room. The pain helps, brings him back to the moment, lets him focus. 

He opens his mouth to yell at her, to tell her how fucking unfair this shit is, but when he sees her face, he realizes it’s all she can do to keep it together. He knows that other people wouldn’t be able to see it, the slight downturn of her mouth, the way she won’t meet his eyes, the stiffness in her shoulders. She’s afraid. 

“You don’t wanna lose me, do you?” he asks quietly.

“No,” she admits quietly. “But I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have. I love you. I just want you to be safe.”

Fuck. This is all so fucked up. Clint runs his hand through his hair.

“We have these damn worksheets,” Clint says as he makes his way back to sit with her on the sofa. “Phil’s taught me a lot about relationships over the years. I didn’t use it with us, but I should have. We can start over and figure out how to make it work.”

His voice sounds desperate even to his own ears but damned if he’s going to let her leave him. He can’t lose her. He just can’t. 

“A kink sheet can’t change what I am. It doesn’t matter how many rules we follow. I’m not going to stop looking at you and wondering what it would be like to break your fingers and keep you for myself, to make you mine and no one else’s. And if that’s who I am, then I’m not safe for you.”

Clint’s already shaking his head before she gets to the end of her sentence. “I was already yours, and I already knew what you wanted of me,” Clint says softly because it’s true. Maybe the hardest part of yesterday was that he wasn’t surprised by any of it.

Phil clears his throat. “I hate to interrupt, but I feel that both of you are missing a key point in all of this. Namely, that fantasies are not reality. Nat, you acted out a fantasy with Clint, but even in doing so you didn’t actually damage his knees, blind him, or break his fingers. Why not?”

Nat looks at her hands. “I didn’t want to really hurt him.”

“Right. You had thoughts — fantasies — but you placed limits on how you acted those out because of the potential dangers and repercussions. Is that right?” Phil asks. His voice is firm, but gentle — like it had been when he asked Clint why he hadn’t taken care of himself. 

“Yes.”

“Okay, so you know the dangers of your thoughts, and you don’t actually want to act them out. That’s why they’re called ‘fantasies.’”

Nat shakes her head, looking physically ill. “No, I thought those things, thought those for months. It’s part of me. You can’t trust me to be around Clint like this. Someone who dreams about torturing their loved ones isn’t normal, they’re a monster.”

Phil sighs and leans forward, elbows on knees. “Everyone has deep, dark desires that they keep in the back of their mind. It’s not unique to you. I’m not going to pretend that everyone has the same proclivities as you. Growing up in the Red Room damaged you.” Phil’s never one to pull punches, but even so, Clint winces. He shifts on his feet and glances at Natasha. Clint resents any implication that he’s damaged, even though he knows he’s fucked up. But Nat just nods. She knows this truth. 

“I imagine that what passed for affection was less than optimal and that likely influences your relationship now, but being abused doesn't make you dangerous. You have a different understanding of love than mainstream society. But you know the difference between having a fantasy where you actually blind your lover and a scene where you scare him to think he has been blinded. That’s how fantasies work, Natasha. ”

“I— I didn’t know,” she says so quietly that Clint can barely hear her.

“I know. But that’s not your fault. You can’t learn things you were never allowed to learn. Being human and having relationships was never part of your education. You’re making up for it now. It’s not going to be easy, but no one blames you for that,” Phil says gently.

Nat nods and Clint can see the tears threatening to spill over. Shit. He’s still mad and more than a little scared, but he loves her, and of all people, Nat should not be crying. He grits his teeth through the pain as he scooches closer to her and then pulls her into his arms. 

“Hey, hey. I’ve got you, Nat. I’m fucked up, too, okay? I’m fucked up, too. I didn’t know that either. We’re both learning, and we’ll get through this together,” he whispers in her ear.

She nods against his shoulder and wraps her arms around him. Phil quietly slips out of the room, taking the now cold coffee carafe with him. Clint is grateful for the discretion, and it doesn’t go unnoticed by Nat. She clings a little tighter to him, his shoulder growing suspiciously warm and damp where her face rests. 

“I thought — I thought that if you could see the worst of me and that if you still wanted me afterwards, it would mean that I’m not the monster they made me, that maybe I was worth all the love you give me. Clint, I’m so sorry,” she says. Her voice cracks from all the silent tears, and she loosens her grip like she’s sorry just for needing to be loved.

Clint grabs her back even harder, even though it pulls painfully on the cuts on his chest. He doesn’t know how to say what he feels — that he’s no better, that he kills like she does, and never loses a night of sleep over it. That where she wants to hurt him, he wants to be hurt. That he’s found more of himself in her than he’s ever had before. He doesn’t know how to tell her how broken they are together, so he just holds her and hopes that she knows.

They sit together in silence for a while longer. Eventually, though, Nat pulls back looking as composed as ever. Not a stray tear or a red eye to be seen. Clint knows that he didn’t imagine Nat crying, but in a way it feels like something so surreal that it’s no more than a dream. He runs a hand through his hair and leans back against the sofa. 

A warm cup of coffee appears as if by magic, but the hand attached to the cup indicates that it’s just Phil. 

“I think you’ve done a lot here today,” Phil says. “Going over your kink sheets, establishing boundaries and rules, learning all the safety protocols that I’ve taught Clint, learning to talk through your scenes — all of those things are going to take a lot of time to master. There’s no rush, and either of you can come talk to me at any time if you need help, though the relationship counselor that you’re going to get might also be a good avenue to pursue.”

“We’re getting a relationship counselor?” Clint blurts out, not sure how he feels about the prospect. It’s clearly not a _choice_ they’re being given, but the idea of trying to share the fucked up, tangled mess of his and Nat’s relationship is terrifying. Phil might understand, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else will. 

“Yes. It’s an order and one of two main stipulations of your relationship continuing. The other is that if anything like this ever happens again, you will both be posted so far apart that you’ll never be in the same hemisphere ever again. It’s not something I would like to do, and after today I don’t imagine it being necessary, but I want you both to understand that this is your only second chance. There won’t be another. Now I’m needed back in DC. I assume that you two have this situation under control?”

The threat sits heavy in the air. Clint swallows. He knows that Phil would do it — Phil is always willing to do the hard shit to protect his people. In a way, it’s nice to know that Phil will be monitoring them, keeping them both in check. He’s the only person Clint would ever trust to do it. 

“We do,” Nat confirms. “Thank you, Phil.”

“Yeah, we really appreciate it,” Clint agrees, and it’s true. Having Phil there to pick up the pieces and give them direction is familiar. Phil is steady, grounded, and Clint trusts that he won’t lead them wrong. If Phil thinks they can make this work, Clint can almost believe it. 

Phil waves it away as if he hasn’t saved their relationship. “It’s up to the two of you to make it work. I’m only here to give you the tools you’re missing.” Despite his casual words, Phil steps forward to kiss Nat’s cheek, clasp Clint’s shoulder firmly. “I know you won’t disappoint me.”

As if they could possibly consider betraying Phil’s trust in them. 

Clint watches Phil gather his things and slip out the front door. Nat’s at the door immediately after Phil leaves and locks the door behind him. She makes her way back to the sofa silently and sits beside Clint. 

“It’s nearly lunch. Nap and then we review each other’s kink sheets?” she suggests.

“Yeah, that sounds good,” Clint says with a smile.

They make their way to the bedroom slowly and then slide under the covers together. Clint still hurts, but between the Tylenol and Advil, he’s barely at a two today. He finds a comfortable position on his back and Nat curls around him carefully, her head on his chest, safely above the cuts. 

“I know you could kill me with your pinkie or something, but you know I can take care of you, too, right? Just ‘cause you’re the dom doesn’t mean you gotta always be the strong one here,” Clint murmurs into her ear. 

He can feel her smile against his chest. “I know. You’re just as strong as I am. You always have been. I’ve just never been allowed that before.”

His fingers thread through her hair. It’s gorgeous, but it’s fried from all the shit she puts it through — dyeing, drying, perming, styling. Still, it’s Nat, and it’s perfect. “You are now, Tasha.”

“I know, Clint. I know.”

And for all the fear and the pain and the _hurt_ that came with yesterday, Clint believes her. He wonders if maybe it wasn’t all for the best because god knows Nat never would have come clean about anything she said this morning if this hadn’t happened. Sometimes you have to bleed to purge the wound. 

It’ll be a while before he’s able to really trust her again, maybe even longer before he’s able to forgive her — before he stops seeing her as another bad guy at night when he closes his eyes — but holding her, Clint knows that she’s worth it, and that he’s found someone who finally loves him for who he is. 

It’s something worth fighting for.


End file.
